Getting an appointment to deal with pperwork at the Madrid offices of the National Social Security Institute is mission impossible. There are citizens who have taken up to four months to get an appointment after spending day after day in front of the computer, as nobody answers the phone. The central government is looking for ways to solve this problem, while the CSIF trade union demands an urgent meeting and denounces that almost 10,000 employees are missing to put an end to the collapse of these offices. If this does not happen, the unions will increase their protests, explains the newspaper El Mundo.
The Social Security offices process pensions, widows’ and widowers’ benefits, maternity and paternity leave and the minimum vital income (IMV). Some of these offices only give appointments for 40 people each day, which is provoking a wave of complaints that have even reached the Ombudsman.
At the door of the office on Paseo de Extremadura in Alcorcón (Madrid), a woman went yesterday to try to get an appointment after several weeks of desperation. “My husband has died and I need to arrange the pension. I have called more than 20 times and nobody answers and I don’t know how to get an appointment on the Internet,” said the 72-year-old woman yesterday. After more than four months, José Andrés has managed to get an appointment. “This is a joke. I’ve been trying to get an appointment to retire for four months. They told me to do it in the early hours of the morning and I have been staying up until 2am until I got it,” he says.
The CCOO, UGT and CSIF trade unions have been mobilising for several weeks to get management to increase the number of staff in the Social Security offices. “We workers want to serve citizens when they need it and in the way they choose. We don’t want people to despair at home trying to get an appointment they can’t get, or only to speak to a machine that tells them to call back. The lack of attention sometimes leads to the interruption of incomes to which citizens are entitled,” criticises CSIF.
Begoña Gil, spokesperson for the CSIF union, reiterated yesterday that “the situation of Social Security is chaotic”. “The telephones are jammed, the workforce is overstretched and this overload of work has led to a huge backlog of unprocessed IMV files. Our citizens are not being properly attended to and Minister Escrivá is still not reacting,” Gil added.
The Ministry of Social Security acknowledges the problem, but denies that there is a collapse. They claim that the agency has lost 23% of its civil servants in 10 years and that they are filling the vacancies with interims. They add that there are now 21,975 civil servants, due to the meagre replacement rates in the years prior to the pandemic and mass retirements in a context of an ageing workforce. One in three employees in the social security system is over 60 years old and eight out of ten are over 50.
